1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to presentation of documents and interactive computer generated content in data processing and more specifically to sizing modification of multiple view elements on a web page.
2. Description of the Related Art
A Web portal, also known as a public portal, is a Web page that provides resources and services in a graphical user interface. Wikipedia defines Web Portal as follows:                A web portal is a site that provides a single function via a web page or site. Web portals often function as a point of access to information on the World Wide Web. Portals present information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from the search engine standard, web portals offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, infotainment, and other features. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.Users of web portals include e-mail services, search engines and online shopping services. In order to provide resources and services, specialized content areas occupy windows within the Web portal. These specialized content areas are called portlets. A user can edit, maximize, minimize or float the portlet within the Web portal.        
In addition to portlets, windows or frames may also be displayed on the graphical user interface. As used herein, the term view element shall mean a portlet, a frame or a window in a Web page or a graphical user interface. Many software applications deal with multiple view elements in a single screen view such as Portal, Eclipse, Integrated Solution Console (ISC), Tivoli Enterprise Portal (TEP), and other applications.
When multiple view elements are combined in a single screen view, the content of each view element is dynamically retrieved. Some view elements have a lot of content, and some do not. Therefore, a user may need to enlarge the user's browser window in order to have a clear display of all view elements. Continuous manual adjustment of the browser window size is undesirable at least because it can reduce productivity on the part of the user.
Moreover, when multiple view elements within a Web portal display dynamically retrieve data, the multiple view elements may be improperly sized for the user to be able to read the dynamically retrieved data. For example, a view element that had very little data and that had a small size may retrieve a large amount of data that requires the view element to have a large size in order to be properly viewed.
Dynamic Drive's “Iframe SSI script II” dynamically resizes an IFRAME to the height of the page contained within the IFRAME in order to eliminate IFRAME scrollbars from appearing while showing the entire external content. ORACLE's Studio determines the placement of the portlet on the page with a higher priority portlet displaying closer to the left side of the page. Moreover, it is known to resize frames and even to allow frames and images to overlap in order to better utilize space on a web page.
However, a need exists for a way to resize multiple portals and the data content in the multiple portals in order to give a user the best access to the data on the web page. What is needed beyond the prior art is a way to properly size portal view elements for viewer use.